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Yahoo To Produce Sci-Fi Streaming Sitcom
jfruh (300774) writes "As the heydays of Internet portals recede into the mists of history and Yahoo tries to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, the company has decided to dip its toes into the incredibly expensive and unpredictable world of producing full-length television shows to compete with the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and HBO. One of the two may intrigue Slashdot readers: Paul Feig, co-creator of the cult '90s hit 'Freaks and Geeks' (and more recently the director of 'Bridesmaids') will product "Other Space," a comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers who stumble onto an alternate universe. The second show, about a fictional Las Vegas NBA team, will appeal to Yahoo's sports audience." I wonder how long it will be until Google, Microsoft, and Apple are also all producing TV shows.
There's no kind of atmosphere.
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Microsoft already IS producing its own shows.
No friggen clue why. I'm pretty sure Apple and Google are smarter than that. Especially Google, since they've got youtube and just have half the internet produce their video content for them.
What's that? Some kind of device to improve willpower? To help you with your last testament?
Or just lousy editing?
I'm voting for the last one...
For the last couple of years, mobile and "cloud" were the new things. Both absurd from a certain point of view - mobile because what were people doing with it exactly? Facebook and Snapchat? And cloud, as a concept, is not new. Every few years, companies don't have a choice and need to move into new markets because they're getting yelled out by shareholders. Fine. "Original Programming" is the new thing now? Everyone wants to do this (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, now Yahoo, probably Facebook next month), they want to have a set top box in the living room that can be used for everything, but the irony is laughable because you need to own practically every set top box on the market to get all of the content out there since no one company has everything.
So, "Original Programming" is going to be three times as expensive as cable and you'll be tracked and data mined.
Sorry, but this really has no appeal for me. I like the occasional comic relief in my sci-fi but knowing it's a sitcom makes me not want to watch it. Jar Jar Binks is not funny. He's annoying. Droids that flap their arms around and behave in an overly anthropomorphized manner aren't funny. Spaceballs is funny but only because it's a spoof.
"a comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers who stumble onto an alternate universe"
Who better to produce this than a company that has no clue what it is doing and historically has wasted billions of dollars on pointless crap.
It's 45 years of age with teenage kids giving him trouble, bad spousal relationship, mid-life crisis...etc.
Microsoft are already doing a live-action Halo series for Xbox Live
Microsoft is already creating a bunch of shows related to the xbox service. Numerous documentaries and shows have been mentioned, including a halo show that Steven Speilberg is somehow involved in.
Microsoft IS producing show for its Live platform
What I do not understand is why producing a full length tv shows must be incredibly expensive ???
Do they need to employ all the UNIONIZE workers on the set ?
Why can't people produce incredibly great TV shows without having to pay an arm and a leg for each episode ?
Wow, they've almost made it to the bottom of my "esteem" list!
- scientists
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- programmers, physicians, carpenters, plumbers, etc.
- journalists
- politicians
- lawyers
- actors, movie producers
- marketeers, advertisement agencies
- lobbyists, RIAA, MPAA, etc.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
That Google does a remake of the 60's sitcom, retitled "My Mother the (self-driving) Car".
Sounds like some real crap. Someone should put that Yahoo girl on a leash!
The internet age: giant companies with huge pots of money, searching for a direction.
Google wants to fix the world. So does Bill Gates. Yahoo wants to be Netflix. Netflix wants to be Amazon, and Amazon wants to be Google.
It seems the money came too easily and too abundantly, and there was never any plan past the basics: Microsoft, unify the desktop computer; Google, search engine; Netflix, streaming video; Amazon, tax-free products online.
Futurist Traditionalism
I mean the idea of nontraditional companies making shows.
Last century the embodiment of that idea became "Soap Operas".
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This actually makes sense. What in the world does a company like Yahoo have to do with producing a television show? That's easy - they already have the infrastructure in place to deliver that content to millions of people. They just need the content. That only leaves them a couple options. One is to try and work out some exclusive distribution deals for existing content, but that is certainly going to be re-runs of an existing show. So the other option is to fund the production of new media that they will own all rights to. I say why not. Give it a go. The downside for us consumers? Oh, just even more fragmentation of where / how we can watch shows. Netflix for that, HBO for this other, Hulu, now Yahoo, on and on.
Better known as 318230.
and then there's Red Dwarf. The brits do it pretty well.
Netflix and Amazon, as streaming content providers, have apps on various devices such as some smart TVs, Roku, etc. At present I'm not aware of any Yahoo video app like that. Sure, the kids will just watch on their laptops - if they care enough to watch such shows and assuming they hear about them - but the older crowd that buys Roku, Amazon Fire, and similar devices won't watch without a dedicated app. We'll see what happens, but this sounds like a foolish thing for Yahoo to do unless they are able to get viewers that somehow (ads) translates into revenue.
I suppose anything could happen, but making a TV show doesn't seem to fit with Apple and Microsoft's business model. Google may do it or may not care about it at all and view it as a distraction - 50-50 on that. This is the first big decision Yahoo has made under Marissa Mayer that makes me wonder if they know what they are doing. I haven't necessarily agreed with everything she's done, but none of the other decisions seemed to be grasping at straws in desperation like this one does. It makes me wonder if things at Yahoo are actually pretty bad if this seems like a good idea to them. Well, if I'm wrong and Yahoo is right, they'll make some money and if I'm right that this idea won't work, I guess they won't be any worse off unless it spooks investors that they really are out of good ideas to raise revenue.
The second show, about a fictional Las Vegas NBA team, will appeal to Yahoo's sports audience.
...Yahoo hopes. Let's wait and see.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In 1999, it was all about eyeballs, clicks and e-commerce. In 2010 it was all about cloud and mobile. Now it's all about tablets and eyeballs again with the entertainment angle. I know interest rates are low and stocks are an attractive investment now, but some of the stuff pumping up this current bubble is even less well thought out than pets.com and the like back in '99 and 2000. You would think some people would learn from the last 20 years.
I see how Netflix et al can be a very useful service for entertainment junkies. With two young kids and a very demanding job, I don't get much time to watch movies and TV anymore unless you count Disney stuff. What I don't see is every single company trying to go out and do what Netflix did with their original content creation. It's kind of like Morgan Stanley going into the chocolate business to compete with Hershey simply because their investors told them it was a good idea.
Oh well, I'll just sit back and watch this bubble pop too, and hopefully I'll still be employed in my boring old-school IT job. :-) Oh, look over there, it's a shiny cloud!!!
Fuck the fucking beta
Yahoo Japan has produced a number of streaming shows over the years. So it's not exactly new for Yahoo per se.
Kind of sounds like Red Dwarf.
Maybe they plan on stealing the Red Dwarf episodes, then using CGI to cover the Red Dwarf ship with the American stars and stripes and to replace the faces of the characters with something more pro-American, like the face of Tom Cruise (for Lister), the face of some Silicon Valley engineer (for Rimmer) and the face of Vin Diesel for "the Rottweiler" (formally "the Cat", but "the Cat" just isn't "American" enough). They could call the show "Red, White and Blue Dwarf", or the "Star Spangled Dwarf", or "Shock and Awe Dwarf" or something. I think it would be funny if their budget ran out before they had a chance to dub the voices over with something more American sounding. In my opinion, Vin Diesel would sound better as a British Rasta than he does now...
Anyone else concerned that the money should be, I don't know, going towards innovating in the tech sector rather than entertainment? If I were an investor I'd be worried about this kind of spending.
Media Wars: The executives of established media feel they aren't getting richer fast enough and some Johnny-come-latelys who initially made their money through technology are stepping on their lawn.
So... Red Dwarf meets Sliders?
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Because only Netflix seems to understand there's huge markets outside of the U.S.A.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
There are a few shows out but it's mostly post-apocalyptic stuff: Revolution's premise falls into that realm even if the writing is hit and miss. Hard science fiction a la Red Mars (book) is rare on TV. Warp drives and wormholes have some theory behind them but saying they are futuristic is a bit of a leap -- they still exist as fiction only.
So Yahoo has the infrastructure to serve out video content eh?
Why not provide something useful that is growing in popularity like TWITCH or Picarto
Hell, hook that shit up to tumblr, which they already own, sell ad revenue like YouTube used to for content creators
They could be dominant in this area if they started now and really brought a solid service to the table
The problem is that most of the TV writers out there know a lot more about how to get a job writing for TV than they know about science.
So you end up with concepts that might have worked as a 5 minute skit on a comedy show being dragged on and on and on.
Personally, I'd like to see something like Freefall as a series.
You've got a sci-fi sitcom, which already sounds iffy as hell, and it's made by Yahoo? That sounds like a combination from hell, but maybe it'll start off awesome and then only become a pile of crap later. You know, like they did with Launchcast.
Yes, the big corps have run out of ideas. Marrissa was supposed to be Yahoo!'s great blonde hope, but as we see, someone who is quite intelligent in her field (look at her pedigree, she ain't no dummie!).
Yahoo! over the last couple of years has gotten really ... cheap looking. The finance page is littered with shitty sponsored ads and "articles" Yahoo! Finance used to be the place to go, now they screwed it up. Bloomberg for me now.
Anyway, I think Yahoo! is just doing things - aping everyone else - in the hopes that something will work.
Let's see, there's at least tens of thousands of SF anf Fantasy novels out there, maybe hundreds of thousands, and some have won awards as being well worth reading.
But we'll go come up with something that Hollywood producers (IQ == belt size) will understand, who will approach it with the following ideas
1. We've got Names! We've got SPECIAL EFFECTS! Why would we need plot, continuity, stories worth watching?
All we need is EXPLOSIONS!!!
2. All geeks are all stupid, and they'll watch anything we film, esp. if there's sexy babes and EXPLOSIONS!
mark "so, when are they going to do, say Bujold's Miles series, or Robinson's Mars series, or...."
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Will they show a beautiful and responsive webmail interface in some episodes? Think of the speed we'll be able to run Javascript at in the future, when some new tech replaces silicon! We'll even be able to access the notepad feature in less than five seconds!
Alternate dimensions and time travel are usually the fall back in pretty much all Sci-Fi series when they're running out of ideas and the series is going downhill. They're apparently starting out with it, not a good sign.
part kills it for a lot of potential viewers. I know in the neighborhood where I live in Seattle that no one I know has enough bandwidth for streaming video. Netflix is still a mail-only thing for this area.
Yahoo seems to be pushing homosexuality for example by the shear number of stories about gays in their daily news feed. I'm assuming the plot will be something like "Holy Covenant UCC Homosexual Pilgrims married in space".
I wonder how long it will be until Google, Microsoft, and Apple are also all producing TV shows.
Microsoft produces (or, at the very least, distributes) The Guild .
How much is "expensive"? What's your budget?
Then, choose the already existing novels that you want to turn into a series. This gives a beginning and ending to your series so you'll be better able to control costs.
Gritty crime drama fantasy? Vlad Taltos by Steven Brust
Historical vampire romp? Count Saint-Germain by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Need more cute? Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
Dystopian future? Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams (not the movie)
Space fantasy fun? The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
Ultra stylized fantasy world? The Witch World by Andre Norton
Gritty war fantasy? The Black Company by Glen Cook
I'm sure that lots of other people can come up with lots of other examples. There's something available out there for every production budget and schedule.
I think the idea is they will be exclusive to the xbox marketplace/video service thing they have. One of the programs is the documentary on unearthing the Atari E.T. cartridges.
"The first round of Xbox Originals will contain a healthy variety of shows, from the futuristic teen drama about robots "Humans," to the steampunk Western "Deadlands" (based on the tabletop role-playing game of the same name), to the street soccer documentary "Every Street United." Other programs included "Winterworld," "Gun Machine," "Extraordinary Believers" and "Food Show."
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/or...
Only the most "advanced" apes are under the delusion that there is a time called being "grown up", or experience a resultant "mid-life crisis" by becoming disillusioned. The other species have avoided being duped through embracing the throwing of shit at others, becoming super-sexual "experimenters", and etc "immature" behaviors.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must correct an "anthropomorphic pan-sexual xenomorph fetishist" who is confused as to which Microsoft CEO tosses chairs and which leaps over them.
IRC for people who like GUIs?
Futurist Traditionalism
Because yahoo! wants to try and get more audience into their webpages, like with their tech page for example. May be the strategy is to have higher quality content. They get good numbers into tumblr but the main site probably needs more people to engage with it, especially with the new design.
Huh? Exclusive content is fine and need not lead to any sort of hardware fragmentation. You don't need multiple boxes for supporting exclusive content. You just need to support standards.
Currently, I believe the standard is a x264-encoded matroska file, spit with rar and made more fault-tolerant with par2, transferred over nntp, and metadata'ed by nzb, searchable by newznab protocol. The one standard is compatible with all content, and anyone can release content that conforms to the specs. I have one box, and on it I can watch Veep and House of Cards and Alpha House. And The Walking Dead and The Daily Show. Comedians in Cars Drinking Coffee. All kinds of BBC and Channel 4 and Sky stuff. There's literally nothing I know about, that I can't watch. The standard works with everyone's shows. It's not an optimum standard, but it's the best thing there is, right now.
The only "fragmentation" is the difference between those who opt to accept revenue, and those who refuse it. Currently most are unified, in deciding to reject viewers' offers of money.
If Yahoo chooses to participate in the standard, then they can make revenue from it. The could trivially sell a "block" nntp account that serves their own files, and serve corresponding nzbs. For money. The trick is that they have to be thinking in terms of taking money. If they think in terms like "prevent people from _____" or "sell our box" or "DRMed stream" or "control ____" or whatever, instead of making money, then that just means someone else gets to have the money, and they get $0. But it's not like the same people don't still get to watch the show. They just won't pay Yahoo for it, because Yahoo wouldn't be accepting money.
(If it seems like I'm belaboring a certain point there, well, duh. Yet it needs such stressing because in spite of how obvious it is, most of these "businesses" have forgotten it.)
It would be really awesome if Yahoo were to totally buck the trend and actually be a tech leader, by taking a pro-revenue approach. Jaws would drop, worldwide.
That's what's so great: the "pirate HTPC" is the box that makes all other boxes look like jokes, and yet there's no real reason it need be limited to "pirate" stuff. And Louie C. K. proved it's not limited. But his site isn't really compatible with peoples' automation (yet), so each video has to be handled manually and individually. And that's fine if you're only selling a few videos, but once you start talkin' series you need people's sickbeards and nzbdrones racking up charges. It's only common sense.
It sounds like a bad idea, just like in real life.
if they understand that, why don't they service the majority of them then?
just mean?
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